MIRRORS | Silvio Porzionato

Executed with a fresh and immediate pictorial gesture, lit up with full and mellow tints and made vibrant through a series of further pictorial interventions – wide strips of colour spread with a spatula, visual disturbances, drippings – the faces of Porzionato’s women engage the viewer with a game of references that has its roots in the tradition of classical art, powerfully devoted to beauty, but which finds its completion in the instinctive power of expressionism.

Wonderfully beautiful, the women painted by the artist are never portraits, but rather archetypes of contemporary femininity, depicted not only according to current aesthetic standards, but also fulfilling a psychological search into their idiosyncrasies and their discomforts. In fact, the girls seem to have been caught in an intimate moment of recognition of themselves in a mirror, a moment – today more than ever – flavoured with anxiety and expectations, with joy and with terror. Dressed up, made up, ready to put themselves on show for themselves and for us, Porzionato’s women search in the mirror, and therefore in our eyes, for the confirmation of their existence, the acceptance of their beings as they are. Splendid and above all so true in this spasmodic need to understand oneself.